Effective risk mitigation and post-disaster recovery depends upon the efficient

allocation of scarce resources through good decision-making. The problem is that

making good decisions depends on understanding many complex problems and their

interrelationships. Good quality, and relevant information must be gathered and

analysed before it can be converted into knowledge that can be applied to mitigate

risks and solve post-disaster recovery problems.

The transformation from reactive to pro-active concepts and tools for planning and

response needs to be supported.

The Canterbury Earthquake sequence 2010-2011 in New Zealand highlighted the

need for decision support tools to inform and support, among others, decision on:

• damage assessment, recovery and resilience enhancement of impacted

infrastructures;

• the management of temporary housing in the short and long-term;

• the reconstruction planning at urban-level.

First, the paper reports and analyses the aforementioned requirements, based on the

perspectives of the stakeholders and key agencies involved in the same decision

making processes, namely: Strong Christchurch Infrastructure Rebuilding Team,

SCIRT; Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority, CERA; and Canterbury

Earthquake Temporary Accommodation Service, CETAS.

Secondly, the paper presents the idea of an open source solution for consequencebased

decision-making tools to be developed by, and to be made available worldwide

to stakeholders involved in natural hazard risk mitigation and management processes.

To reach this goal, we have established an open source Consortium with members

from multiple countries. The activities of the open source Consortium, summarized in

the paper, include: the further development of existing open-source modeling tools

(e.g. MaeViz, EQvis) along with the necessary IT framework and infrastructure to

support them; and the development of additional applications and modules to address

specific aspects of risk assessment and mitigation, post-disaster response and recovery

for multiple-hazards.

The plan is to open the Consortium to developers and users on a global scale. The

entire international community involved in modeling, analyzing and responding to

risks is invited to participate in this initiative.